You have certainly developed into a wonderful correspondent. Honest-to-goodness, a letter you started my way about a month ago was quite the most satisfactory and amusing thing I’ve received since I’ve been over here. Based on practically no material, yet it was alive with interest, every line. There’s nothing like a finishing school education. If I thought that you could knit, I would immediately appoint you as my _marraine_ (godmother), for it’s quite possible for one person to have more than one soldier and I am but a soldier of the second class in the French Army. As I understand it, the chief duty of a _marraine_ is to write letters--you’ve started that in good style--and to knit wool scarfs, which the devoted soldier hands to a French peasant woman to unravel and make a pair of socks out of.... Many Yale boys have wandered in upon us of late, Alan Winslow, Wally Winter, George Mosely, and others. Also Chester Bassett, late of Washington and Harvard University, who I believe has the good fortune to be acquainted with you, a very recommendable young man. They tell me that Cord Meyer is aviating at some camp nearby, but, not having any machines, they have to spend their time touring the country in a high powered motor. Had a long and gossipy letter from Pat the other day, containing details of many weddings and engagements, even unto young ---- ----. All my classmates are doing the same stunt. How about being original and waiting until the war is over and seeing who of the competitors are left? I quite expect to be, but it’s luck I’m trusting to; there’s a lot of war left in the nations of Europe. One never can tell; I may come home on permission in a French uniform with a wing on my collar.... When the American Air Service is a little further along, it may be that we will be taken over from the French Army. I finished up in one division of the school the other day and passed to another for brevet, the tests for a military aviator. I sort of have the impression that I wrote you a few weeks ago about it, but not being sure, run the risk of repetition, which, if any, I hope you will excuse. This epistle is being written out at the _piste_ (flying field), waiting for the wind to drop enough to fly, and with me seated amidst a bunch of Russians, so if there are any superfluous “iskis” or “ovitches” in this, you will understand why. The Russians are great fliers; in fact they know so much about it that they never listen to their monitors and as a result break more machines than all the other pupils combined. A month ago five of them went to the next school for acrobacy and in a week every one of them had killed himself. I pulled a bit of the same Russian stuff in the spiral class of the Blériot. All the work is solo--never a flight double command so one has to get instructions on the ground and follow them in the air.